


(my house is) such a sad mile away

by jaegermighty



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials, Comment Fic, Daemons, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 06:40:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaegermighty/pseuds/jaegermighty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eyes ahead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(my house is) such a sad mile away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Saucery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saucery/gifts).



> I doubt I'm cool enough to name a fic after a Jimi lyric but there you have it anyway.

Aldyth settled when Derek was eleven, young enough for it to be unusual, young enough for the adults to hover around him nervously, always talking about him in hushed tones and worried faces, like there was something wrong with him, with Aldyth. Derek didn’t pay much attention, back then, too enamoured of the curve of Aldyth’s spine, the comforting heat of her against his side, the way they could tear through the forest together in a flash of light, running so fast their feet barely touched the ground.

Her fur, they both love her fur. Her chest and belly are snow white, and she has streaks of all the different shades of brown, and the edge of her spine and her tail and her ears are pitch black, and shaggy sweeps of red, almost orange, starting at the top of her head and crawling down to her flanks. Derek can see the forest in her fur, and the desert, and the craggy outline of mountains, all swept together into the long lines of her body. Sometimes she’ll lie next to him in the grass with her chin on his shoulder and his skin will look like an extension of her, like he’s the dæmon and she’s the person, like the world is upside down, like she’s the one that people should look at first, should address and recognize.

She’s the wrong kind of wolf, was the problem. All werewolves have wolf dæmons but they can change, they can shift their size and their color and their shape, they can blend. Aldyth can’t, no matter how she tries, she’s too unique, too rare. Once his father pulled him aside and told him _she’s gorgeous_ _Derek but she can’t - we have to -_ Derek doesn’t like to remember that day.

Aldyth doesn’t like to remember the bad parts anyway, her fur will raise and she’ll tug at his jacket cuff with her teeth and say _eyes ahead_ , like she always does. _Eyes ahead, the future is what matters now_.

She won’t indulge Derek in his black moods, will flick her tail in the air and trot off to find Hani and Stiles. She likes them the best, always turns her snout up at Scott and his nervous little Kahu, who still flickers between forms with every breath - squirrel, marmoset, hawk, mouse, cat, owl, beetle. They give Derek a headache. She’s wary of Lydia’s Sunan, too, who is a snake more often than not, curled around Lydia’s wrist like a slowly writhing bracelet.

But she likes Hani, liked Hani before Derek even noticed her, really. Likes to creep up on her from behind, pounce on her from in-between the leaves, make her and Stiles both jump half a foot in the air. Likes to pick her up by the scruff of her neck like a cub and cart her around while Stiles laughs, likes to curl up around her in the sunlight, so close that you can’t tell their fur apart. They’ll roll around together for hours if Derek and Stiles don’t stop them, until you really can’t tell them apart, just a tumbleweed of color.

Hani is so small she fits in the palm of Stiles’s hand, sometimes he just carries her around in his pocket, and all you can see are the points of her ears, the flick of her tail. She makes the most annoying noises, all the time, like she’s talking to everybody despite the fact that Stiles is the only one who can understand her. She runs faster than Derek and Aldyth, can dart up the sides of walls and chairs and curl up on a ceiling beam, can jump like a rabbit, will always be moving, twitching, constantly in motion. She’s the color of sand, ground so finely that it’s practically dust. She has big, ink-dark eyes that see everything. She really, really wants Derek to touch her.

( _We could_ , Aldyth will say sometimes, late at night when Derek can’t pretend not to listen, _we could, they would let us_ , but Derek doesn’t like to think about it, doesn’t like to consider what Hani’s fur would feel like beneath his hand, what it’d be like to scratch behind her ears like Stiles does, how soft she would be, how small, how Derek could hold her in one hand. How Stiles would look with his arms wrapped around Aldyth’s neck, pinned to the ground or a floor with her paws on her shoulders, her teeth on - how he’d - God, he can’t think about it.)

But there’s always a moment, when Hani and Aldyth first touch, when Derek can feel it, and so can Stiles, he can tell. It’s like the air freezes for just a minute, and the only thing that exists anymore is the four of them, forever living in that split second, like they will never be free of that one second of _about to_ , of _almost_ and _not quite_ and _going to be_. When Stiles is quiet and Derek is quiet and they’re being quiet together, and Derek thinks, _he thinks about it too._

_(Eyes ahead, eyes ahead Derek, it’s the future.)_

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Eyes Ahead; it's the Future](https://archiveofourown.org/works/382818) by [omens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omens/pseuds/omens)
  * [(My House Is) Such A Sad Mile Away [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/404423) by [paraka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraka/pseuds/paraka)




End file.
